Where Have All the Farmers Gone?

Where Have All the Farmers Gone?

Since 1992, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been developing plans
to expand the network of locks and dams along the Mississippi River.
The Mississippi is the primary conduit for shipping American soybeans
into global commerce-about 35,000 tons a day. The Corps' plan would
mean hauling in up to 1.2 million metric tons of concrete to lengthen
ten of the locks from 180 meters to 360 meters each, as well as to
bolster several major wing dams which narrow the river to keep the
soybean barges moving and the sediment from settling. This construction
would supplement the existing dredges which are already sucking 85
million cubic meters of sand and mud from the river's bank and bottom
each year. Several different levels of "upgrade" for the river have
been considered, but the most ambitious of them would purportedly
reduce the cost of shipping soybeans by 4 to 8 cents per bushel. Some
independent analysts think this is a pipe dream.

Around the same time the Mississippi plan was announced, the five
governments of South America's La Plata Basin-Bolivia, Brazil,
Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay-announced plans to dredge 13 million
cubic meters of sand, mud, and rock from 233 sites along the
Paraguay-Paran River. That would be enough to fill a convoy of dump
trucks 10,000 miles long. Here, the plan is to straighten natural river
meanders in at least seven places, build dozens of locks, and construct
a major port in the heart of the Pantanal-the world's largest wetland.
The Paraguay-Paran flows through the center of Brazil's burgeoning
soybean heartland-second only to the United States in production and
exports. According to statements from the Brazilian State of Mato
Grasso, this "Hidrov¡a" (water highway) will give a further boost to
the region's soybean export capacity.
Lobbyists for both these projects argue that expanding the barge
capacity of these rivers is necessary in order to improve
competitiveness, grab world market share, and rescue farmers (either
U.S. or Brazilian, depending on whom the lobbyists are addressing) from
their worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Chris Brescia,
president of the Midwest River Coalition 2000, an alliance of commodity
shippers that forms the primary lobbying force for the Mississippi
plan, says, "The sooner we provide the waterway infrastructure, the
sooner our family farmers will benefit." Some of his fellow lobbyists
have even argued that these projects are essential to feeding the world
(since the barges can then more easily speed the soybeans to the
world's hungry masses) and to saving the environment (since the hungry
masses will not have to clear rainforest to scratch out their own
subsistence).

Probably very few people have had an opportunity to hear both pitches
and compare them. But anyone who has may find something amiss with
the argument that U.S. farmers will become more competitive versus
their Brazilian counterparts, at the same time that Brazilian farmers
will, for the same reasons, become more competitive with their U.S.
counterparts. A more likely outcome is that farmers of these two
nations will be pitted against each other in a costly race to maximize
production, resulting in short-cut practices that essentially
strip-mine their soil and throw long-term investments in the land to
the wind. Farmers in Iowa will have stronger incentives to plow up land
along stream banks, triggering faster erosion of topsoil. Their
brethren in Brazil will find themselves needing to cut deeper into the
savanna, also accelerating erosion. That will increase the flow of
soybeans, all right-both north and south. But it will also further
depress prices, so that even as the farmers are shipping more, they're
getting less income per ton shipped. And in any case, increasing volume
can't help the farmers survive in the long run, because sooner or later
they will be swallowed by larger, corporate, farms that can make up for
the smaller per-ton margins by producing even larger volumes.

So, how can the supporters of these river projects, who profess to be
acting in the farmer's best interests, not notice the illogic of this
form of competition? One explanation is that from the advocates' (as
opposed to the farmers') standpoint, this competition isn't illogical
at all-because the lobbyists aren't really representing farmers.
They're working for the commodity processing, shipping, and trading
firms who want the price of soybeans to fall, because these are the
firms that buy the crops from the farmers. In fact, it is the same
three agribusiness conglomerates-Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill,
and Bunge-that are the top soybean processors and traders along both
rivers.
Welcome to the global economy. The more brutally the U.S. and Brazilian
farmers can batter each-other's prices (and standards of living) down,
the greater the margin of profit these three giants gain. Meanwhile,
another handful of companies controls the markets for genetically
modified seeds, fertilizers, and herbicides used by the
farmers-charging oligopolistically high prices both north and south of
the equator.

In assessing what this proposed digging-up and reconfiguring of two of
the world's great river basins really means, keep in mind that these
projects will not be the activities of private businesses operating
inside their own private property. These are proposed public works, to
be undertaken at huge public expense. The motive is neither the plight
of the family farmer nor any moral obligation to feed the world, but
the opportunity to exploit poorly informed public sentiments about
farmers' plights or hungry masses as a means of usurping public
policies to benefit private interests. What gets thoroughly Big
Muddied, in this usurping process, is that in addition to subjecting
farmers to a gladiator-like attrition, these projects will likely bring
a cascade of damaging economic, social, and ecological impacts to the
very river basins being so expensively remodeled.

What's likely to happen if the lock and dam system along the
Mississippi is expanded as proposed? The most obvious effect will be
increased barge traffic, which will accelerate a less obvious cascade
of events that has been underway for some time, according to Mike Davis
of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Much of the
Mississippi River ecosystem involves aquatic rooted plants, like
bullrush, arrowhead, and wild celery. Increased barge traffic will kick
up more sediment, obscuring sunlight and reducing the depth to which
plants can survive. Already, since the 1970s, the number of aquatic
plant species found in some of the river has been cut from 23 to about
half that, with just a handful thriving under the cloudier conditions.
"Areas of the river have reached an ecological turning point," warns
Davis. "This decline in plant diversity has triggered a drop in the
invertebrate communities that live on these plants, as well as a drop
in the fish, mollusk, and bird communities that depend on the diversity
of insects and plants." On May 18, 2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service released a study saying that the Corps of Engineers project
would threaten the 300 species of migratory birds and 127 species of
fish in the Mississippi watershed, and could ultimately push some into
extinction. "The least tern, the pallid sturgeon, and other species
that evolved with the ebbs and flows, sandbars and depths, of the river
are progressively eliminated or forced away as the diversity of the
river's natural habitats is removed to maximize the barge habitat,"
says Davis.

The outlook for the Hidrov¡a project is similar. Mark Robbins, an
ornithologist at the Natural History Museum at the University of
Kansas, calls it "a key step in creating a Florida Everglades-like
scenario of destruction in the Pantanal, and an American Great
Plains-like scenario in the Cerrado in southern Brazil." The
Paraguay-Paran feeds the Pantanal wetlands, one of the most diverse
habitats on the planet, with its populations of woodstorks, snailkites,
limpkins, jabirus, and more than 650 other species of birds, as well as
more than 400 species of fish and hundreds of other less-studied
plants, mussels, and marshland organisms. As the river is dredged and
the banks are built up to funnel the surrounding wetlands water into
the navigation path, bird nesting habitat and fish spawning grounds
will be eliminated, damaging the indigenous and other traditional
societies that depend on these resources. Increased barge traffic will
suppress river species here just as it will on the Mississippi.
Meanwhile, herbicide-intensive soybean monocultures-on farms so
enormous that they dwarf even the biggest operations in the U.S.
Midwest-are rapidly replacing diverse grasslands in the fragile
Cerrado. The heavy plowing and periodic absence of ground cover
associated with such farming erodes 100 million tons of soil per year.
Robbins notes that "compared to the Mississippi, this southern river
system and surrounding grassland is several orders of magnitude more
diverse and has suffered considerably less, so there is much more at
stake."
Supporters of such massive disruption argue that it is justified
because it is the most "efficient" way to do business. The perceived
efficiency of such farming might be compared to the perceived
efficiency of an energy system based on coal. Burning coal looks very
efficient if you ignore its long-term impact on air quality and climate
stability. Similarly, large farms look more efficient than small farms
if you don't count some of their largest costs-the loss of the genetic
diversity that underpins agriculture, the pollution caused by
agro-chemicals, and the dislocation of rural cultures. The simultaneous
demise of small, independent farmers and rise of multinational food
giants is troubling not just for those who empathize with dislocated
farmers, but for anyone who eats.

An Endangered Species

Nowadays most of us in the industrialized countries don't farm, so we
may no longer really understand that way of life. I was born in the
apple orchard and dairy country of Dutchess County, New York, but since
age five have spent most of my life in New York City-while most of the
farms back in Dutchess County have given way to spreading subdivisions.
It's also hard for those of us who get our food from supermarket
shelves or drive-thru windows to know how dependent we are on the
viability of rural communities.

Whether in the industrial world, where farm communities are growing
older and emptier, or in developing nations where population growth is
pushing the number of farmers continually higher and each generation is
inheriting smaller family plots, it is becoming harder and harder to
make a living as a farmer. A combination of falling incomes, rising
debt, and worsening rural poverty is forcing more people to either
abandon farming as their primary activity or to leave the countryside
altogether-a bewildering juncture, considering that farmers produce
perhaps the only good that the human race cannot do without.

Since 1950, the number of people employed in agriculture has plummeted
in all industrial nations, in some regions by more than 80 percent.
Look at the numbers, and you might think farmers are being singled out
by some kind of virus:

_In Japan, more than half of all farmers are over 65 years old; in the
United States, farmers over 65 outnumber those under 35 by three to
one. (Upon retirement or death, many will pass the farm on to children
who live in the city and have no interest in farming themselves.)_ In
New Zealand, officials estimate that up to 6,000 dairy farms will
disappear during the next 10 to 15 years-dropping the total number by
nearly 40 percent.
_ In Poland, 1.8 million farms could disappear as the country is
absorbed into the European Union-dropping the total number by 90
percent.
_ In Sweden, the number of farms going out of business in the next decade is expected to reach about 50 percent.
_ In the Philippines, Oxfam estimates that over the next few years the
number of farm households in the corn producing region of Mindanao
could fall by some 500,000-a 50 percent loss.
_ In the United States, where the vast majority of people were farmers
at the time of the American Revolution, fewer people are now full-time
farmers (less than 1 percent of the population) than are full-time
prisoners.
_ In the U.S. states of Nebraska and Iowa, between a fifth and a third
of farmers are expected to be out of business within two years.

Of course, the declining numbers of farmers in industrial nations does
not imply a decline in the importance of the farming sector. The world
still has to eat (and 80 million more mouths to feed each year than the
year before), so smaller numbers of farmers mean larger farms and
greater concentration of ownership. Despite a precipitous plunge in the
number of people employed in farming in North America, Europe, and East
Asia, half the world's people still make their living from the land. In
sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, more than 70 percent do. In these
regions, agriculture accounts, on average, for half of total economic
activity.

Some might argue that the decline of farmers is harmless, even a
blessing, particularly for less developed nations that have not yet
experienced the modernization that moves peasants out of backwater
rural areas into the more advanced economies of the cities. For most of
the past two centuries, the shift toward fewer farmers has generally
been assumed to be a kind of progress. The substitution of high-powered
diesel tractors for slow-moving women and men with hoes, or of large
mechanized industrial farms for clusters of small "old fashioned"
farms, is typically seen as the way to a more abundant and affordable
food supply. Our urban-centered society has even come to view rural
life, especially in the form of small family-owned businesses, as
backwards or boring, fit only for people who wear overalls and go to
bed early-far from the sophistication and dynamism of the city.

Urban life does offer a wide array of opportunities, attractions, and
hopes-some of them falsely created by urban-oriented commercial
media-that many farm families decide to pursue willingly. But city life
often turns out to be a disappointment, as displaced farmers find
themselves lodged in crowded slums, where unemployment and ill-health
are the norm and where they are worse off than they were back home.
Much evidence suggests that farmers aren't so much being lured to the
city as they are being driven off their farms by a variety of
structural changes in the way the global food chain operates. Bob Long,
a rancher in McPherson County, Nebraska, stated in a recent New York
Times article that passing the farm onto his son would be nothing less
than "child abuse."
As long as cities are under the pressure of population growth (a
situation expected to continue at least for the next three or four
decades), there will always be pressure for a large share of humanity
to subsist in the countryside. Even in highly urbanized North America
and Europe, roughly 25 percent of the population-275 million
people-still reside in rural areas. Meanwhile, for the 3 billion
Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans who remain in the countryside-and
who will be there for the foreseeable future-the marginalization of
farmers has set up a vicious cycle of low educational achievement,
rising infant mortality, and deepening mental distress.

Hired Hands on Their Own Land

In the 18th and 19th centuries, farmers weren't so trapped. Most
weren't wealthy, but they generally enjoyed stable incomes and strong
community ties. Diversified farms yielded a range of raw and processed
goods that the farmer could typically sell in a local market.
Production costs tended to be much lower than now, as many of the
needed inputs were home-grown: the farmer planted seed that he or she
had saved from the previous year, the farm's cows or pigs provided
fertilizer, and the diversity of crops-usually a large range of grains,
tubers, vegetables, herbs, flowers, and fruits for home use as well as
for sale-effectively functioned as pest control.

Things have changed, especially in the past half-century, according to
Iowa State agricultural economist Mike Duffy. "The end of World War II
was a watershed period," he says. "The widespread introduction of
chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, produced as part of the
war effort, set in motion dramatic changes in how we farm-and a
dramatic decline in the number of farmers." In the post-war period,
along with increasing mechanization, there was an increasing tendency
to "outsource" pieces of the work that the farmers had previously done
themselves-from producing their own fertilizer to cleaning and
packaging their harvest. That outsourcing, which may have seemed like a
welcome convenience at the time, eventually boomeranged: at first it
enabled the farmer to increase output, and thus profits, but when all
the other farmers were doing it too, crop prices began to fall.

Before long, the processing and packaging businesses were adding more
"value" to the purchased product than the farmer, and it was those
businesses that became the dominant players in the food industry.
Instead of farmers outsourcing to contractors, it became a matter of
large food processors buying raw materials from farmers, on the
processors' terms. Today, most of the money is in the work the farmer
no longer does-or even controls. In the United States, the share of the
consumer's food dollar that trickles back to the farmer has plunged
from nearly 40 cents in 1910 to just above 7 cents in 1997, while the
shares going to input (machinery, agrochemicals, and seeds) and
marketing (processing, shipping, brokerage, advertising, and retailing)
firms have continued to expand. (See graph, page 18.) The typical U.S.
wheat farmer, for instance, gets just 6 cents of the dollar spent on a
loaf of bread-so when you buy that loaf, you're paying about as much
for the wrapper as for the wheat.

Ironically, then, as U.S. farms became more mechanized and more
"productive," a self-destructive feedback loop was set in motion:
over-supply and declining crop prices cut into farmers' profits,
fueling a demand for more technology aimed at making up for shrinking
margins by increasing volume still more. Output increased dramatically,
but expenses (for tractors, combines, fertilizer, and seed) also
ballooned-while the commodity prices stagnated or declined. Even as
they were looking more and more modernized, the farmers were becoming
less and less the masters of their own domain.

On the typical Iowa farm, the farmer's profit margin has dropped from
35 percent in 1950 to 9 percent today. In order to generate the same
income, this farm would need to be roughly four times as large today as
in 1950-or the farmer would need to get a night job. And that's
precisely what we've seen in most industrialized nations: fewer farmers
on bigger tracts of land producing a greater share of the total food
supply. The farmer with declining margins buys out his neighbor and
expands or risks being cannibalized himself.
There is an alternative to this huge scaling up, which is to buck the
trend and bring some of the input-supplying and post-harvest
processing-and the related profits-back onto the farm. But more
self-sufficient farming would be highly unpopular with the industries
that now make lucrative profits from inputs and processing. And since
these industries have much more political clout than the farmers do,
there is little support for rescuing farmers from their increasingly
servile condition-and the idea has been largely forgotten. Farmers
continue to get the message that the only way to succeed is to get big.

The traditional explanation for this constant pressure to "get big or
get out" has been that it improves the efficiency of the food
system-bigger farms replace smaller farms, because the bigger farms
operate at lower costs. In some respects, this is quite true. Scaling
up may allow a farmer to spread a tractor's cost over greater acreage,
for example. Greater size also means greater leverage in purchasing
inputs or negotiating loan rates-increasingly important as
satellite-guided combines and other equipment make farming more and
more capital-intensive. But these economies of scale typically level
off. Data for a wide range of crops produced in the United States show
that the lowest production costs are generally achieved on farms that
are much smaller than the typical farm now is. But large farms can
tolerate lower margins, so while they may not produce at lower cost,
they can afford to sell their crops at lower cost, if forced to do
so-as indeed they are by the food processors who buy from them. In
short, to the extent that a giant farm has a financial benefit over a
small one, it's a benefit that goes only to the processor-not to the
farmer, the farm community, or the environment.

This shift of the food dollar away from farmers is compounded by
intense concentration in every link of the food chain-from seeds and
herbicides to farm finance and retailing. In Canada, for example, just
three companies control over 70 percent of fertilizer sales, five banks
provide the vast majority of agricultural credit, two companies control
over 70 percent of beef packing, and five companies dominate food
retailing. The merger of Philip Morris and Nabisco will create an
empire that collects nearly 10 cents of every dollar a U.S. consumer
spends on food, according to a company spokesperson. Such high
concentration can be deadly for the bottom line, allowing agribusiness
firms to extract higher prices for the products farmers buy from them,
while offering lower prices for the crop they buy from the farmers.

An even more worrisome form of concentration, according to Bill
Heffernan, a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri, is the
emergence of several clusters of firms that-through mergers, takeovers,
and alliances with other links in the food chain-now possess "a
seamless and fully vertically integrated control of the food system
from gene to supermarket shelf." (See diagram, page 20.) Consider the
recent partnership between Monsanto and Cargill, which controls seeds,
fertilizers, pesticides, farm finance, grain collection, grain
processing, livestock feed processing, livestock production, and
slaughtering, as well as some well-known processed food brands. From
the standpoint of a company like Cargill, such alliances yield
tremendous control over costs and can therefore be extremely profitable.

But suppose you're the farmer. Want to buy seed to grow corn? If
Cargill is the only buyer of corn in a hundred mile radius, and Cargill
is only buying a particular Monsanto corn variety for its mills or
elevators or feedlots, then if you don't plant Monsanto's seed you
won't have a market for your corn. Need a loan to buy the seed? Go to
Cargill-owned Bank of Ellsworth, but be sure to let them know which
seed you'll be buying. Also mention that you'll be buying Cargill's
Saskferco brand fertilizer. OK, but once the corn is grown, you don't
like the idea of having to sell to Cargill at the prices it dictates?
Well, maybe you'll feed the corn to your pigs, then, and sell them to
the highest bidder. No problem-Cargill's Excel Corporation buys pigs,
too. OK, you're moving to the city, and renouncing the farm life! No
more home-made grits for breakfast, you're buying corn flakes. Well,
good news: Cargill Foods supplies corn flour to the top cereal makers.
You'll notice, though, that all the big brands of corn flakes seem to
have pretty much the same hefty price per ounce. After all, they're all
made by the agricultural oligopoly.

As these vertical food conglomerates consolidate, Heffernan warns,
"there is little room left in the global food system for independent
farmers"-the farmers being increasingly left with "take it or leave it"
contracts from the remaining conglomerates. In the last two decades,
for example, the share of American agricultural output produced under
contract has more than tripled, from 10 percent to 35 percent-and this
doesn't include the contracts that farmers must sign to plant
genetically engineered seed. Such centralized control of the food
system, in which farmers are in effect reduced to hired hands on their
own land, reminds Heffernan of the Soviet-style state farms, but with
the Big Brother role now being played by agribusiness executives. It is
also reminiscent of the "company store" which once dominated small
American mining or factory towns, except that if you move out of town
now, the store is still with you. The company store has gone global.

With the conglomerates who own the food dollar also owning the
political clout, it's no surprise that agricultural policies-including
subsidies, tax breaks, and environmental legislation at both the
national and international levels-do not generally favor the farms. For
example, the conglomerates command growing influence over both private
and public agricultural research priorities, which might explain why
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), an agency ostensibly
beholden to farmers, would help to develop the seed-sterilizing
Terminator technology-a biotechnology that offers farmers only greater
dependence on seed companies. In some cases the influence is indirect,
as manifested in government funding decisions, while in others it is
more blatant. When Novartis provided $25 million to fund a research
partnership with the plant biology department of the University of
California at Berkeley, one of the conditions was that Novartis has the
first right of refusal for any patentable inventions. Under those
circumstances, of course, the UC officials-mindful of where their
funding comes from-have strong incentives to give more attention to
technologies like the Terminator seed, which shifts profit away from
the farmer, than to technologies that directly benefit the farmer or
the public at large.
Even policies that are touted to be in the best interest of farmers,
like liberalized trade in agricultural products, are increasingly
shaped by non-farmers. Food traders, processors, and distributors, for
example, were some of the principal architects of recent revisions to
the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT)-the World Trade
Organization's predecessor-that paved the way for greater trade flows
in agricultural commodities. Before these revisions, many countries had
mechanisms for assuring that their farmers wouldn't be driven out of
their own domestic markets by predatory global traders. The traders,
however, were able to do away with those protections.

The ability of agribusiness to slide around the planet, buying at the
lowest possible price and selling at the highest, has tended to tighten
the squeeze already put in place by economic marginalization, throwing
every farmer on the planet into direct competition with every other
farmer. A recent UN Food and Agriculture Organization assessment of the
experience of 16 developing nations in implementing the latest phase of
the GATT concluded that "a common reported concern was with a general
trend towards the concentration of farms," a process that tends to
further marginalize small producers and exacerbate rural poverty and
unemployment. The sad irony, according to Thomas Reardon, of Michigan
State University, is that while small farmers in all reaches of the
world are increasingly affected by cheap, heavily subsidized imports of
foods from outside of their traditional rural markets, they are
nonetheless often excluded from opportunities to participate in food
exports themselves. To keep down transaction costs and to keep
processing standardized, exporters and other downstream players prefer
to buy from a few large producers, as opposed to many small producers.

As the global food system becomes increasingly dominated by a handful
of vertically integrated, international corporations, the servitude of
the farmer points to a broader society-wide servitude that OPEC-like
food cartels could impose, through their control over food prices and
food quality. Agricultural economists have already noted that the
widening gap between retail food prices and farm prices in the 1990s
was due almost exclusively to exploitation of market power, and not to
extra services provided by processors and retailers. It's questionable
whether we should pay as much for a bread wrapper as we do for the
nutrients it contains. But beyond this, there's a more fundamental
question. Farmers are professionals, with extensive knowledge of their
local soils, weather, native plants, sources of fertilizer or mulch,
native pollinators, ecology, and community. If we are to have a world
where the land is no longer managed by such professionals, but is
instead managed by distant corporate bureaucracies interested in
extracting maximum output at minimum cost, what kind of food will we
have, and at what price?

Agrarian Services

No question, large industrial farms can produce lots of food. Indeed,
they're designed to maximize quantity. But when the farmer becomes
little more than the lowest-cost producer of raw materials, more than
his own welfare will suffer. Though the farm sector has lost power and
profit, it is still the one link in the agrifood chain accounting for
the largest share of agriculture's public goods-including half the
world's jobs, many of its most vital communities, and many of its most
diverse landscapes. And in providing many of these goods, small farms
clearly have the advantage.

Local economic and social stability: Over half a century ago, William
Goldschmidt, an anthropologist working at the USDA, tried to assess how
farm structure and size affect the health of rural communities. In
California's San Joaquin Valley, a region then considered to be at the
cutting edge of agricultural industrialization, he identified two small
towns that were alike in all basic economic and geographic dimensions,
including value of agricultural production, except in farm size.
Comparing the two, he found an inverse correlation between the sizes of
the farms and the wellbeing of the communities they were a part of.

The small-farm community, Dinuba, supported about 20 percent more
people, and at a considerably higher level of living-including lower
poverty rates, lower levels of economic and social class distinctions,
and a lower crime rate-than the large-farm community of Arvin. The
majority of Dinuba's residents were independent entrepreneurs, whereas
fewer than 20 percent of Arvin's residents were-most of the others
being agricultural laborers. Dinuba had twice as many business
establishments as Arvin, and did 61 percent more retail business. It
had more schools, parks, newspapers, civic organizations, and churches,
as well as better physical infrastructure-paved streets, sidewalks,
garbage disposal, sewage disposal and other public services. Dinuba
also had more institutions for democratic decision making, and a much
broader participation by its citizens. Political scientists have long
recognized that a broad base of independent entrepreneurs and property
owners is one of the keys to a healthy democracy.
The distinctions between Dinuba and Arvin suggest that industrial
agriculture may be limited in what it can do for a community. Fewer
(and less meaningful) jobs, less local spending, and a hemorrhagic flow
of profits to absentee landowners and distant suppliers means that
industrial farms can actually be a net drain on the local economy. That
hypothesis has been corroborated by Dick Levins, an agricultural
economist at the University of Minnesota. Levins studied the economic
receipts from Swift County, Iowa, a typical Midwestern corn and soybean
community, and found that although total farm sales are near an
all-time high, farm income there has been dismally low-and that many of
those who were once the financial stalwarts of the community are now
deeply in debt. "Most of the U.S. Corn Belt, like Swift County, is a
colony, owned and operated by people who don't live there and for the
benefit of those who don't live there," says Levin. In fact, most of
the land in Swift County is rented, much of it from absentee landlords.

This new calculus of farming may be eliminating the traditional role of
small farms in anchoring rural economies-the kind of tradition, for
example, that we saw in the emphasis given to the support of small
farms by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan following World War II. That
emphasis, which brought radical land reforms and targeted investment in
rural areas, is widely cited as having been a major stimulus to the
dramatic economic boom those countries enjoyed.
Not surprisingly, when the economic prospects of small farms decline,
the social fabric of rural communities begins to tear. In the United
States, farming families are more than twice as likely as others to
live in poverty. They have less education and lower rates of medical
protection, along with higher rates of infant mortality, alcoholism,
child abuse, spousal abuse, and mental stress. Across Europe, a similar
pattern is evident. And in sub-Saharan Africa, sociologist Deborah
Bryceson of the Netherlands-based African Studies Centre has studied
the dislocation of small farmers and found that "as de-agrarianization
proceeds, signs of social dysfunction associated with urban areas
[including petty crime and breakdowns of family ties] are surfacing in
villages."
People without meaningful work often become frustrated, but farmers may
be a special case. "More so than other occupations, farming represents
a way of life and defines who you are," says Mike Rosemann, a
psychologist who runs a farmer counseling network in Iowa. "Losing the
family farm, or the prospect of losing the family farm, can generate
tremendous guilt and anxiety, as if one has failed to protect the
heritage that his ancestors worked to hold onto." One measure of the
despair has been a worldwide surge in the number of farmers committing
suicide. In 1998, over 300 cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh, India,
took their lives by swallowing pesticides that they had gone into debt
to purchase but that had nonetheless failed to save their crops. In
Britain, farm workers are two-and-a-half times more likely to commit
suicide than the rest of the population. In the United States, official
statistics say farmers are now five times as likely to commit suicide
as to die from farm accidents, which have been traditionally the most
frequent cause of unnatural death for them. The true number may be even
higher, as suicide hotlines report that they often receive calls from
farmers who want to know which sorts of accidents (Falling into the
blades of a combine? Getting shot while hunting?) are least likely to
be investigated by insurance companies that don't pay claims for
suicides.

Whether from despair or from anger, farmers seem increasingly ready to
rise up, sometimes violently, against government, wealthy landholders,
or agribusiness giants. In recent years we've witnessed the Zapatista
revolution in Chiapas, the seizing of white-owned farms by landless
blacks in Zimbabwe, and the attacks of European farmers on warehouses
storing genetically engineered seed. In the book Harvest of Rage,
journalist Joel Dyer links the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed
nearly 200 people-as well as the rise of radical right and
antigovernment militias in the U.S. heartland-to a spreading despair
and anger stemming from the ongoing farm crisis. Thomas Homer-Dixon,
director of the Project on Environment, Population, and Security at the
University of Toronto, regards farmer dislocation, and the resulting
rural unemployment and poverty, as one of the major security threats
for the coming decades. Such dislocation is responsible for roughly
half of the growth of urban populations across the Third World, and
such growth often occurs in volatile shantytowns that are already
straining to meet the basic needs of their residents. "What was an
extremely traumatic transition for Europe and North America from a
rural society to an urban one is now proceeding at two to three times
that speed in developing nations," says Homer-Dixon. And, these nations
have considerably less industrialization to absorb the labor. Such an
accelerated transition poses enormous adjustment challenges for India
and China, where perhaps a billion and a half people still make their
living from the land.

Ecological stability: In the Andean highlands, a single farm may
include as many as 30 to 40 distinct varieties of potato (along with
numerous other native plants), each having slightly different optimal
soil, water, light, and temperature regimes, which the farmer-given
enough time-can manage. (In comparison, in the United States, just four
closely related varieties account for about 99 percent of all the
potatoes produced.) But, according to Karl Zimmerer, a University of
Wisconsin sociologist, declining farm incomes in the Andes force more
and more growers into migrant labor forces for part of the year, with
serious effects on farm ecology. As time becomes constrained, the
farmer manages the system more homogenously-cutting back on the number
of traditional varieties (a small home garden of favorite culinary
varieties may be the last refuge of diversity), and scaling up
production of a few commercial varieties. Much of the traditional crop
diversity is lost.

Complex farm systems require a highly sophisticated and intimate
knowledge of the land-something small-scale, full-time farmers are more
able to provide. Two or three different crops that have different root
depths, for example, can often be planted on the same piece of land, or
crops requiring different drainage can be planted in close proximity on
a tract that has variegated topography. But these kinds of cultivation
can't be done with heavy tractors moving at high speed. Highly
site-specific and management-intensive cultivation demands ingenuity
and awareness of local ecology, and can't be achieved by heavy
equipment and heavy applications of agrochemicals. That isn't to say
that being small is always sufficient to ensure ecologically sound food
production, because economic adversity can drive small farms, as well
as big ones, to compromise sustainable food production by
transmogrifying the craft of land stewardship into the crude labor of
commodity production. But a large-scale, highly mechanized farm is
simply not equipped to preserve landscape complexity. Instead, its
normal modus is to use blunt management tools, like crops that have
been genetically engineered to churn out insecticides, which obviate
the need to scout the field to see if spraying is necessary at all.

In the U.S. Midwest, as farm size has increased, cropping systems have
gotten more simplified. Since 1972, the number of counties with more
than 55 percent of their acreage planted in corn and soybeans has
nearly tripled, from 97 to 267. As farms scaled up, the great
simplicity of managing the corn-soybean rotation-an 800 acre farm, for
instance, may require no more than a couple of weeks planting in the
spring and a few weeks harvesting in the fall-became its big selling
point. The various arms of the agricultural economy in the region, from
extension services to grain elevators to seed suppliers, began to
solidify around this corn-soybean rotation, reinforcing the farmers'
movement away from other crops. Fewer and fewer farmers kept livestock,
as beef and hog production became "economical" only in other parts of
the country where it was becoming more concentrated. Giving up
livestock meant eliminating clover, pasture mixtures, and a key source
of fertilizer in the Midwest, while creating tremendous manure
concentrations in other places.

But the corn and soybean rotation-one monoculture followed by
another-is extremely inefficient or "leaky" in its use of applied
fertilizer, since low levels of biodiversity tend to leave a range of
vacant niches in the field, including different root depths and
different nutrient preferences. Moreover, the Midwest's shift to
monoculture has subjected the country to a double hit of nitrogen
pollution, since not only does the removal and concentration of
livestock tend to dump inordinate amounts of feces in the places (such
as Utah and North Carolina) where the livestock operations are now
located, but the monocultures that remain in the Midwest have much
poorer nitrogen retention than they would if their cropping were more
complex. (The addition of just a winter rye crop to the corn-soy
rotation has been shown to reduce nitrogen runoff by nearly 50
percent.) And maybe this disaster-in-the-making should really be
regarded as a triple hit, because in addition to contaminating
Midwestern water supplies, the runoff ends up in the Gulf of Mexico,
where the nitrogen feeds massive algae blooms. When the algae die, they
are decomposed by bacteria, whose respiration depletes the water's
oxygen-suffocating fish, shellfish, and all other life that doesn't
escape. This process periodically leaves 20,000 square kilometers of
water off the coast of Louisiana biologically dead. Thus the act of
simplifying the ecology of a field in Iowa can contribute to severe
pollution in Utah, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Iowa.

The world's agricultural biodiversity-the ultimate insurance policy
against climate variations, pest outbreaks, and other unforeseen
threats to food security-depends largely on the millions of small
farmers who use this diversity in their local growing environments. But
the marginalization of farmers who have developed or inherited complex
farming systems over generations means more than just the loss of
specific crop varieties and the knowledge of how they best grow. "We
forever lose the best available knowledge and experience of place,
including what to do with marginal lands not suited for industrial
production," says Steve Gleissman, an agroecologist at the University
of California at Santa Cruz. The 12 million hogs produced by Smithfield
Foods Inc., the largest hog producer and processor in the world and a
pioneer in vertical integration, are nearly genetically identical and
raised under identical conditions-regardless of whether they are in a
Smithfield feedlot in Virginia or Mexico.
As farmers become increasingly integrated into the agribusiness food
chain, they have fewer and fewer controls over the totality of the
production process-shifting more and more to the role of "technology
applicators," as opposed to managers making informed and independent
decisions. Recent USDA surveys of contract poultry farmers in the
United States found that in seeking outside advice on their operations,
these farmers now turn first to bankers and then to the corporations
that hold their contracts. If the contracting corporation is also the
same company that is selling the farm its seed and fertilizer, as is
often the case, there's a strong likelihood that that company's
procedures will be followed. That corporation, as a global enterprise
with no compelling local ties, is also less likely to be concerned
about the pollution and resource degradation created by those
procedures, at least compared with a farmer who is rooted in that
community. Grower contracts generally disavow any environmental
liability.

And then there is the ecological fallout unique to large-scale,
industrial agriculture. Colossal confined animal feeding operations
(CAFOs)-those "other places" where livestock are concentrated when they
are no longer present on Midwestern soy/corn farms-constitute perhaps
the most egregious example of agriculture that has, like a garbage
barge in a goldfish pond, overwhelmed the scale at which an ecosystem
can cope. CAFOs are increasingly the norm in livestock production,
because, like crop monocultures, they allow the production of huge
populations of animals which can be slaughtered and marketed at
rock-bottom costs. But the disconnection between the livestock and the
land used to produce their feed means that such CAFOs generate
gargantuan amounts of waste, which the surrounding soil cannot possibly
absorb. (One farm in Utah will raise over five million hogs in a year,
producing as much waste each day as the city of Los Angeles.) The waste
is generally stored in large lagoons, which are prone to leak and even
spill over during heavy storms. From North Carolina to South Korea, the
overwhelming stench of these lagoons-a combination of hydrogen sulfide,
ammonia, and methane gas that smells like rotten eggs-renders miles of
surrounding land uninhabitable.

A different form of ecological disruption results from the conditions
under which these animals are raised. Because massive numbers of
closely confined livestock are highly susceptible to infection, and
because a steady diet of antibiotics can modestly boost animal growth,
overuse of antibiotics has become the norm in industrial animal
production. In recent months, both the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention in the United States and the
World Health Organization have identified such industrial feeding
operations as principal causes of the growing antibiotic resistance in
food-borne bacteria like salmonella and campylobacter (see "Update,"
page 34). And as decisionmaking in the food chain grows ever more
concentrated-confined behind fewer corporate doors-there may be other
food safety issues that you won't even hear about, particularly in the
burgeoning field of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In reaction
to growing public concern over GMOs, a coalition that ingenuously calls
itself the "Alliance for Better Foods"-actually made up of large food
retailers, food processors, biotech companies and corporate-financed
farm organizations-has launched a $50 million public "educational"
campaign, in addition to giving over $676,000 to U.S. lawmakers and
political parties in 1999, to head off the mandatory labeling of such
foods.

Perhaps most surprising, to people who have only casually followed the
debate about small-farm values versus factory-farm "efficiency," is the
fact that a wide body of evidence shows that small farms are actually
more productive than large ones-by as much as 200 to 1,000 percent
greater output per unit of area. How does this jive with the
often-mentioned productivity advantages of large-scale mechanized
operations? The answer is simply that those big-farm advantages are
always calculated on the basis of how much of one crop the land will
yield per acre. The greater productivity of a smaller, more complex
farm, however, is calculated on the basis of how much food overall is
produced per acre. The smaller farm can grow several crops utilizing
different root depths, plant heights, or nutrients, on the same piece
of land simultaneously. It is this "polyculture" that offers the small
farm's productivity advantage.

To illustrate the difference between these two kinds of measurement,
consider a large Midwestern corn farm. That farm may produce more corn
per acre than a small farm in which the corn is grown as part of a
polyculture that also includes beans, squash, potato, and "weeds" that
serve as fodder. But in overall output, the polycrop-under close
supervision by a knowledgeable farmer-produces much more food overall,
whether you measure in weight, volume, bushels, calories, or dollars.

The inverse relationship between farm size and output can be attributed
to the more efficient use of land, water, and other agricultural
resources that small operations afford, including the efficiencies of
intercropping various plants in the same field, planting multiple times
during the year, targeting irrigation, and integrating crops and
livestock. So in terms of converting inputs into outputs, society would
be better off with small-scale farmers. And as population continues to
grow in many nations, and the agricultural resources per person
continue to shrink, a small farm structure for agriculture may be
central to meeting future food needs.

Rebuilding Foodsheds

Look at the range of pressures squeezing farmers, and it's not hard to
understand the growing desperation. The situation has become explosive,
and if stabilizing the erosion of farm culture and ecology is now
critical not just to farmers but to everyone who eats, there's still a
very challenging question as to what strategy can work. The
agribusiness giants are deeply entrenched now, and scattered protests
could have as little effect on them as a mosquito bite on a tractor.
The prospects for farmers gaining political strength on their own seem
dim, as their numbers-at least in the industrial countries-continue to
shrink.

A much greater hope for change may lie in a joining of forces between
farmers and the much larger numbers of other segments of society that
now see the dangers, to their own particular interests, of continued
restructuring of the countryside. There are a couple of prominent
models for such coalitions, in the constituencies that have joined
forces to fight the Mississippi River Barge Capacity and Hidrov¡a Barge
Capacity projects being pushed forward in the name of global soybean
productivity.
The American group has brought together at least the following riverbedfellows:

_ National environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and National
Audubon Society, which are alarmed at the prospect of a public commons
being damaged for the profit of a small commercial interest group;
_ Farmers and farmer advocacy organizations, concerned about the inordinate power being wielded by the agribusiness oligopoly;
_ Taxpayer groups outraged at the prospect of a corporate welfare
payout that will drain more than $1 billion from public coffers;
_ Hunters and fishermen worried about the loss of habitat;
_ Biologists, ecologists, and birders concerned about the numerous threatened species of birds, fish, amphibians, and plants;
_ Local-empowerment groups concerned about the impacts of economic globalization on communities;
_ Agricultural economists concerned that the project will further
entrench farmers in a dependence on the export of low-cost, bulk
commodities, thereby missing valuable opportunities to keep money in
the community through local milling, canning, baking, and processing.

A parallel coalition of environmental groups and farmer advocates has
formed in the Southern hemisphere to resist the Hidrov¡a expansion.
There too, the river campaign is part of a larger campaign to challenge
the hegemony of industrial agriculture. For example, a coalition has
formed around the Landless Workers Movement, a grassroots organization
in Brazil that helps landless laborers to organize occupations of idle
land belonging to wealthy landlords. This coalition includes 57 farm
advocacy organizations based in 23 nations. It has also brought
together environmental groups in Latin America concerned about the
related ventures of logging and cattle ranching favored by large
landlords; the mayors of rural towns who appreciate the boost that
farmers can give to local economies; and organizations working on
social welfare in Brazil's cities, who see land occupation as an
alternative to shantytowns.

The Mississippi and Hidrov¡a projects, huge as they are, still
constitute only two of the hundreds of agro-industrial developments
being challenged around the world. But the coalitions that have formed
around them represent the kind of focused response that seems most
likely to slow the juggernaut, in part because the solutions these
coalitions propose are not vague or quixotic expressions of idealism,
but are site-specific and practical. In the case of the alliance
forming around the Mississippi River project, the coalition's work has
included questioning the assumptions of the Corps of Engineers
analysis, lobbying for stronger antitrust examination of agribusiness
monopolies, and calling for modification of existing U.S. farm
subsidies, which go disproportionately to large farmers. Environmental
groups are working to re-establish a balance between use of the
Mississippi as a barge mover and as an intact watershed. Sympathetic
agricultural extensionists are promoting alternatives to the standard
corn-soybean rotation, including certified organic crop production,
which can simultaneously bring down input costs and garner a premium
for the final product, and reduce nitrogen pollution.

The United States and Brazil may have made costly mistakes in giving
agribusiness such power to reshape the rivers and land to its own use.
But the strategy of interlinked coalitions may be mobilizing in time to
save much of the world's agricultural health before it is too late.
Dave Brubaker, head of the Spira/GRACE Project on Industrial Animal
Production at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health,
sees these diverse coalitions as "the beginning of a revolution in the
way we look at the food system, tying in food production with social
welfare, human health, and the environment." Brubaker's project brings
together public health officials focused on antibiotic overuse and
water contamination resulting from hog waste; farmers and local
communities who oppose the spread of new factory farms or want to close
down existing ones; and a phalanx of natural allies with related
campaigns, including animal rights activists, labor unions, religious
groups, consumer rights activists, and environmental groups.

"As the circle of interested parties is drawn wider, the alliance
ultimately shortens the distance between farmer and consumer," observes
Mark Ritchie, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade
Policy, a research and advocacy group often at the center of these
partnerships. This closer proximity may prove critical to the ultimate
sustainability of our food supply, since socially and ecologically
sound buying habits are not just the passive result of changes in the
way food is produced, but can actually be the most powerful drivers of
these changes. The explosion of farmers' markets, community-supported
agriculture, and other direct buying arrangements between farmers and
consumers points to the growing numbers of nonfarmers who have already
shifted their role in the food chain from that of choosing from the
tens of thousands of food brands offered by a few dozen companies to
bypassing such brands altogether. And, since many of the additives and
processing steps that take up the bulk of the food dollar are simply
the inevitable consequence of the ever-increasing time commercial food
now spends in global transit and storage, this shortening of distance
between grower and consumer will not only benefit the culture and
ecology of farm communities. It will also give us access to much
fresher, more flavorful, and more nutritious food. Luckily, as any food
marketer can tell you, these characteristics aren't a hard sell.